“A Midwife’s Tale” is about how women make — and write — history. I read it during my first semester in graduate school, at a time when I was falling in love with women’s history and with the astonishing discoveries of the scholars who were writing it.

Martha Ballard, a Maine midwife who delivered 816 babies between 1785 and 1812, left behind a diary so terse it was nearly incomprehensible to everyone who encountered it. Until, that is, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, the author of “A Midwife’s Tale.”

Elizabeth L. Hillman Photo: Mills College

Ulrich found Ballard’s diary hiding in plain sight in the Maine State Library, and proceeded to write a breathtaking book about the power and grace of women who do the extraordinary — deliver babies! — every day. It’s not only birth that courses through “A Midwife’s Tale,” however; it’s politics and crime, doctors and farmers, storms and illnesses. In Ulrich’s hands, Ballard’s book became the treasure it had always been.